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A new way to calculate the interaction between a metal and its alloying material could speed the hunt for a new material that combines the hardness of ceramic with the resilience of metal.

The discovery, made by engineers at the University of Michigan, identifies two aspects of this interaction that can accurately predict how a particular alloy will behave—and with fewer demanding, from-scratch quantum mechanical calculations.

“Our findings may enable the use of machine learning algorithms for alloy design, potentially accelerating the search for better alloys that could be used in turbine engines and nuclear reactors,” said Liang Qi, assistant professor of materials science and engineering who led the research.

If you’re willing to dial things up to 10 (unfortunately there’s no 11), you can enjoy the device’s “Full AI Experience.”

Security researchers have been following the xHelper malware on Android with great interest, owing to the app’s seemingly incomprehensible ability to reinstall itself on an infected device despite factory resets.

The three-body problem has vexed mathematicians and physicists for 300 years, but AI can find solutions far faster than any other method anyone has come up with.

While it seems we are making great strides in unlocking the mysteries of the Universe, there is a sizable hole in what we know – up to 95% of the cosmos appears to be missing. We are talking about dark matter and dark energy, two useful, groundbreaking, but yet-to-be-directly-observed explanations for the vast majority of what exists. While there have been various attempts to pin down these ideas, inferred from their gravitational effects, a recent theory from a University of Oxford scientist claims to do away with them entirely. Instead, his model proposes something which may be even more unusual – what if the Universe is actually filled with a “dark fluid” possessing “negative mass”?

Dark matter takes up 27% of the known Universe (per NASA), while dark energy, a repulsive force that makes the Universe expand, gets 68%. Only 5% of the Universe is the observable world, including us and our planet. According to the model, proposed by Dr. Jamie Farnes, both dark matter and dark energy are unified in a fluid which has “negative gravity”. It repels all other material away.

“Although this matter is peculiar to us, it suggests that our cosmos is symmetrical in both positive and negative qualities,” wrote Farnes, astrophysicist, cosmologist and data scientist who worked at Oxford at the time of publishing his paper, and has since moved on to Faculty, a leading AI company.

The three-body problem, one of the most notoriously complex calculations in physics, may have met its match in artificial intelligence: a new neural network promises to find solutions up to 100 million times faster than existing techniques.

First formulated by Sir Isaac Newton, the three-body problem involves calculating the movement of three gravitationally interacting bodies – such as the Earth, the Moon, and the Sun, for example – given their initial positions and velocities.

It might sound simple at first, but the ensuing chaotic movement has stumped mathematicians and physicists for hundreds of years, to the extent that all but the most dedicated humans have tried to avoid thinking about it as much as possible.

Chameleons, salamanders and many toads use stored elastic energy to launch their sticky tongues at unsuspecting insects located up to one-and-a-half body lengths away, catching them within a tenth of a second.

Ramses Martinez, an assistant professor in Purdue’s School of Industrial Engineering and in the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering in Purdue University’s College of Engineering and other Purdue researchers at the FlexiLab have developed a new class of entirely soft robots and actuators capable of re-creating bioinspired high-powered and high-speed motions using stored elastic energy. These robots are fabricated using stretchable polymers similar to rubber bands, with internal pneumatic channels that expand upon pressurization.

Continue reading “Chameleon’s tongue strike inspires fast-acting robots” »

Plus, the first-ever WELL Conference, MIT robots that assemble lunar settlements, and more design-tech news this week.